SALA CONSILINA
Campania, Italy.
About
32 km SW of Potenza on the E side of the Val di Diano,
a long, flat-bottomed valley, very fertile, the floor of a
vanished lake in the high Apennines E of Paestum. The
Tanagro, a tributary of the Sele, connects it with the
coast. Consilinum was 10 km to the S.
Alexander the Molossian is said to have traversed the
Val di Diano to get from the Ionian coast to Paestum
where he won a victory over the Lucanians and Samnites
in 332 B.C. (
Livy 8.17.9-10), but the approaches to the
valley are too difficult to have made it much of a highway. When the Romans conquered the region in 298 B.C.,
the inhabitants were Lucanians who spoke Oscan. The
pre-Lucanian inhabitants were known to the Greeks as Oenotrians.
The earliest burials here are of the Early Iron Age.
Both cremation and inhumation appear, the grave goods
resembling the early Villanovan material of Etruria. A
painted geometric pottery in the
a tenda style of Apulia
and the Ionian coast is found with the Villanovan material, and this imported style seems to have been inspiration for a handsome Geometric ware made locally in the orientalizing period. Greek imports are late: two Corinthian helmets, a few Middle and Late Corinthian pots.
Not till the third quarter of the 6th c. were Attic pots
imported; and with them, in a princely tomb found in
1896, were handsome bronze vases and carved amber.
The bronzes are kin to those of the Heroon of Paestum,
and the tomb form was similar, evidence that Paestum
had a brisk trade with the interior by the second half
of the century. Nothing later than the 6th c. has been
found.
Material from the excavations is in the Museo Provinciale at Salerno and the Certosa di S. Lorenzo at Padula. The contents of the princely tomb are in the Petit Palais in Paris.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
K. Kilian,
Mostra della Preistoria e della
Protostoria nel Salernitano (1962) 63-78
I; J. de la
Genière,
Recherches sur l'age de fer en Italie Meridionale.
Sala Consilina. Bibl. de l'Institut Français de Naples,
2d ser. vol. 1 (1968)
I.
E. RICHARDSON
